this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2024
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Which software was ahead of its time? (lemmy.world)
submitted 10 months ago by Windows94@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml
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[–] BoisZoi@lemmy.ml 110 points 10 months ago (4 children)

Opera back in 2000s.

Compressing webpages, built in mail, built in BitTorrent client, tab stacking, "fit to width" which would remove horizontal scrollbars, page tiling, mouse gestures, rocker gestures, I think it even had a calendar.

It's a shame the direction Opera took after Jon left, but thankfully he started Vivaldi which feels like the spiritual successor.

[–] d3Xt3r@lemmy.nz 45 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Opera also invented the browser Speed Dial, which was super handy back in the day.

But most importantly, Opera invented tabs, or at least the concept of tabbed browsing. I recall using Opera on Windows 3.11 and for the longest time, even during the Win 9x era, no other app used tabs.

In addition to mouse gestures, they had customisable keyboard shortcuts for practically every browser feature, again, something which very few apps bothered with.

The page compression built into Opera Mini was a life saver on Symbian and Windows Mobile devices back in the 2G/GPRS era. Opera Mini loaded pages blindingly quick and there was nothing else like it on the market, even leading up to early Android days.

but thankfully he started Vivaldi which feels like the spiritual successor.

Too bad he made the unfortunate decision of going with the Chromium engine instead of Gecko, or even making their own engine. I would've loved to use Vivalidi if it weren't for that fact.

[–] lud@lemm.ee 9 points 10 months ago

Opera didn't actually invent browser tabs. That's a common misconception.

Tabs was first invented for the browser InternetWorks

[–] dan@upvote.au 19 points 10 months ago

Opera also invented full page zooming. Originally, browser zoom would only increase text size - everything else (including images, the actual page layout, etc) would remain the same size. Opera was the first browser to instead zoom into the entire page.

It also had a lot of features that either require extensions or don't even exist these days. Things like being able to disable JavaScript or change the User-agent per-site, basic content blocking before ad blockers existed (like modern-day ad blockers but you'd manually build your own list of things to block by going into content blocking mode and clicking on them), an option to only show cached images (useful on slow dial up connections), a fully customizable UI (literally every toolbar, button, and status bar segment could be moved around), and many more.

It was truly a web browser for the future, far far ahead of its time. I miss those days.

[–] mwalimu@baraza.africa 4 points 10 months ago

Used to be the first thing we installed on phones and PCs. Opera was blazing fast on basic phones as far back as 2008sh.